After WWI, many women had started smoking while simultaneously taking up more “masculine” roles outside the home. Flappers and suffragettes also smoked, further pushing back against traditional social mores. Prostitutes and the like smoked - not mothers and well-behaved women.
Cigarettes soon became a symbol of freedom and independence, one that tobacco companies capitalized on. By gearing their products toward women, they were able to enlist them as consumers as well as spokespersons. George Washington Hill from American Tobacco told advertising pioneer Edward Bernays that getting female smokers would be “like opening a new gold mine in our front yard."
One way cigarette companies targeted women was by packaging their products as appetite suppressants. Another was by touting them as “torches of freedom.” When suffragettes marched at the Easter Parade in New York City in 1929, many of them - called the “torches of liberty” brigade by Bernays - smoked Lucky Strikes along the way.
They'd been hired by Bernays to do so, and thus made women smoking in public more visible. He later said, “For weeks after the event, editorials praised or condemned the young women who had paraded against the smoking taboo.” Either way, the media took notice, the stunt worked, and women began to smoke with much more frequency.
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